Another early morning...

I got up so early, that it was almost yesterday. That is because I fell asleep on the sofa last night while watching television, and dragging myself to bed at 11 pm, after I had taken my medicines, and going straight to sleep without even turning the light on to read my book. I'd say I got a lot of sleep and when I woke up in the middle of the night, there was no doubt about getting up and making a cup of coffee.

Needless to say, I didn't work on a collage, because after I had showered and eaten dinner, I just didn't have the energy or inspiration to start one. I slept instead on my weekend sleep schedule that's always out of synchronization with the rest of the week. That's the joy of living alone, that you can decide your own hours to be awake and to be active in, without bothering anyone else. The sound of me tapping on the keyboard used to wake the Exfactor up and I know it bothered him tremendously. Maybe as much as his snoring bothered me.

It's really funny how a person can be awake at the most unusual hours and perform as if it is the middle of the day and have her complete brain function without any problem. You would assume that there would be a sort of jet lag effect, but nothing could be further from the truth. When I wake up in the middle of the night, it only takes me a little while to get my wits about me and to be as sharp as a tack. I can easily do a number of tasks well and probably sit for exams as well, as if it was any time during the day. Providing I had studied for them.

I don't think there is much difference in my mood during the morning or the nighttime, but I am more awake and aware in the morning, or I should say, whenever I just get up. I'm usually full of excitement to start the day and I wonder what it will bring and it doesn't have to be anything big, but at night I am ready to start winding down and I get sleepy and tired and I don't want to start any big projects that require a lot of my attention, unless it is a weekend night and I stay up longer than usual.

I'm not grumpy at any time of the day so I am not specifically a morning or an evening person. I guess when it comes down to it, you could say that I'm a middle of the night person, or a wee hours of the morning person. That's when I'm happiest. I like being up when the rest of the world is still asleep, or so I imagine, and I don't hear anything outside yet. I like the darkness all around me that's only punctuated by the few lights that I have on, specifically the desk lamp that points at the keyboard. I feel like I'm in my own little world and that I'm the only person in it and I only share it with the dog and the cats occasionally.

I suppose I like being at the center of my own universe, where I feel safe and solitary and where complications seem very far away and other people's influence can not be felt. I feel invincible and cocooned inside a well lighted cave, where no other creatures live but those that I invite. It's dry and warm in there and I suppose I'm like a bear waking up from her winter sleep. Alert and aware, but safe and sound.

I don't like other people's complications in my life and I keep them at bay as much as possible. That is, when I became aware of this dislike. I used to be a good Samaritan and wanted to help out everybody, but somewhere along the line I learned a lesson not to do that and to not unnecessarily complicate my own life with the problems of other people. I am a good listener and a good advice giver and I do that often and freely, but I do keep my distance and don't pull other people deeply into my life with the idea that I'm going to rescue them from their fate. My help and involvement always end at my doorstep. Of course, in being a good Samaritan there was also a question of pride involved, to assume I knew better and had all the solutions, while I had the biggest mess in my own hands that I was blind to.

You often see that with people who over involve themselves with the lives of other people. Very often they have a mess on their own hands that they can't solve or are even consciously aware of and go around fixing other people's lives. Very often they project their own problems onto the other person and in reality try to solve their own problems through solving the other person's problems, but they are unaware of this.

Anyway, I sit here and let my mind wander from one random thought to the next and see where it will take me. It's almost like creative writing and I take the words as they come and hardly change them. Just like I do when I write for one of my writer's websites. It's a stream of consciousness writing, but the person who talks is the adult me, who is the one who creates. Which means it's not unabashed writing, but writing with a certain amount of control and inhibition, because writing without inhibition would be spilling the beans and I don't know if I'm up to that, although you may think I've spilled the beans already.

It's one thing to appear open and honest with your words, it's another to conceal all the things that you also could have said, but didn't for the sake of propriety. There are always lots of things left unsaid, that we will only say when we are mean old ladies who no longer worry about what impression we will make and who's feelings we are going to hurt. When flattery is an alien concept to us. My intention is to become such a mean old lady and I hope I make it.

Well, those are enough thoughts for today. I don't want to overwhelm you. I could go on and on, but to what purpose when you have zoned out?

I hope you'll all have a lovely day with sunshine on top of it. As an added extra.

Ciao,
Nora

Early Sunday Morning...

I spend a long time each morning taking care of my emails. It's a pleasant occupation and I never get bored with it. It's a good way to start the day and a good exercise for my brain. Some of them are facebook notifications and they are always fun, as they take me from one subject to another and I have to be on my toes and respond to all the different types of comments. The other emails are comments on my blog posts, or responses to my comments on the comments. I hope I still make sense. Either way, I have to switch from one subject to the next and I like to think that these mental acrobatics keep my mind lively and that I will stay alert better for a longer period of my life. Especially if I keep doing this as I grow older.

No doubt this thought is inspired by the fact that I'm turning 55 tomorrow and, although it doesn't seem to me like such a very old age, I am aware of the fact that I need to keep mentally active and always challenge myself. I've seen the slow decline of age in other people and it seemed to come with a certain amount of lack of mental challenges and an overall laziness of the mind, when they couldn't be bothered with how a computer worked or how a cash machine and blamed the machine for their frustrations. I don't want to fall into that kind of trap.

Well, you scratch the surface and what do you find? A woman who is worried about growing older and I didn't think I was, because whatever age I am, I always think it's still young enough. I just have a bad memory sometimes, but I've had that for a long time, so I should not worry about it.

Another thing, just when I was boasting yesterday about not taking naps during the day, I took one in the afternoon. It was very pleasant and really belonged to the tradition of weekend napping. I laid down on the sofa and pushed my face down into the pillow of the armrest and was asleep in no time, totally oblivious of everything around me. This didn't prevent me from sleeping very well last night and, although I read my book for a while, I was gone from this world in the shortest amount of time.

So, you can never say that you'll never do something again or that you always do something, because life is unpredictable and your body has a mind of its own. Well, it really and truly does, doesn't it?

I'm going to spend the day getting this apartment in order, because tomorrow my sister and my nephew and the Exfactor are coming over to help me celebrate my birthday. I must get this place cleaned up, although it isn't in that bad a shape. I do need to vacuum and dust and water the plants. I think I will make a list of chores to do and check them off as I do them. That way I will see the progress and it will be a more rewarding exercise.

I keep trying to see the positive sides of whatever sort of events take place in my life, no matter how insignificant and instead of only living in the moment, I'm trying to look ahead a little bit and project myself into the near future. This is not something I have been doing, as I've only lived from one day to the next and have hardly given tomorrow a thought, let alone the days after that. I'm starting to think about next week now and maybe even the week after that, although this is still very tenuous.

I feel that today is still within my control and maybe the day after that too, but when you get beyond that I don't know how much control I have over the events, although I could have more control if I planned things better. It all depends on how much I am willing to face up to what is coming up, instead of ignoring what may happen. In a way, I'm a procrastinator and hope for things to resolve themselves before we get to the point that I have to. Very often they do with a little help from me, I admit.

I thought I was like a Buddhist by living in the moment, but actually I was living in denial of all sorts of realities by pushing them away and sending them underground to my subconscious. I try not to do that anymore now and to stop and pay attention to what I feel and think about, especially when it regards my future.

I'm very much aware that I have to find my value as a human being in very small and not so very significant things, at least relatively insignificant things if you compare them to what is significant in this society, but I have a high enough opinion of myself that I will be able to do that. I don't have to have a successful career and make a lot of money to prove my worth. My aim is to be able to live with myself in the most comfortable way possible, without causing myself mental pain and agony and to find peace and serenity and a stable frame of mind. If I manage that I will have come very far in this life. How I go about achieving that will be a subject of discussion on the meeting with my therapists on the 21st of this month.

It's very funny how I always get bogged down in a serious subject, isn't it? It's second nature to me. I always have to air my ponderings and make them public to somehow give them more value and authority. I probably should have been a religious leader and I would have led my flock with a daily sermon. No, the power would have gone to my head and I would have made a shambles of it, as do so many of them. Who do they think they are anyway to preach their word at a group of followers who believe in them?

I hope you all have a nice Sunday. Honor the day and don't make too many efforts.

Ciao...

Finally Friday.

I must have had an awful lot of sleep to catch up on, because yesterday all day long, whenever I sat down , I started to nod off after a while, until I made myself come awake again and stand up and do something useful, until I finally gave in and took a long nap on the sofa later in the afternoon. Sometimes it was even difficult to keep a phone conversation going. I talked with my eyes closed, which is not conducive to having a great talk.

So I dragged my butt around and didn't accomplish much. It was all too much effort. I did make it to the supermarket and did all the groceries. I bought some very good food for the dog and I hope that he likes it, because it is amongst the best I could find without breaking the bank. I bought much milk and plenty of coffee pads. They were on sale, thank goodness. For a treat, I bought cookies for myself and I ate them all up. They tasted very fine indeed. Sometimes you just have to sin a little.

It's not as if I can afford to sin, because I've gained 5 kilos this past winter and I have to get rid of them, obviously. I don't quite know how yet , because I love the foods that I am eating right now and it seems more than obvious that I'm getting plenty of them. Leave it to me to eat too much with a gastric band in. I always will find a way.

So yesterday I hardly made it out of bed in the morning and today I'm already up at 5 AM. What woke me up was the impatient pacing around of the Überhund. He didn't even want to go out, but was just walking around the apartment following cats around as if that is a new hobby of his.

When I got up, I walked around like an old woman at first, because my hips hurt from laying in the bed all wrong. I don't know how I managed to do that, but it is the second morning in a row that this has happened. Maybe I am just becoming an old woman, period.

I'm rather excited about today, because I get to go to creative therapy, and it will mean that my weekends will be so much shorter. They used to start on Thursdays, it seemed, and now they will start properly om Friday afternoons. Even then, I still have house cleaning to do this afternoon, so it will really not be a weekend day yet. I must vacuum the apartment and clean up the bathroom. Both jobs that I simply adore. I also have to do some laundry, which I mind much less. There is always so much dog hair in the bathroom stuck on everything! You can't simply sweep or wipe it away, you have to get on your hands and knees and scrub it off!

Well, I will never get first place in the Dutch housewife competition, but I'm always reminded of my late sister in law who didn't care much for cleaning house, but who did a lot of other interesting things with her life. She is much more an example to me than people with super clean houses. When she retired, she bought a house in France with a big vegetable garden and an orchard and she had two cats and two dogs and never a dull moment in her life. My cat Gandhi is one of her cats. So, I have a French cat, a French-Belgian cat and a Dutch cat. We are the European Community.

I just gave the Überhund his new dog food and he wolfed it down in one minute flat. It's supposed to be all natural and as close to homemade as you can get. It's called Butcher's and the first ingredient is meat followed by rice and vegetables, without artificial ingredients. I am trying to read all the small print on the can in four different languages, but it is hard even with my reading glasses on. The one I have now has fresh beef, rice and carrots. There is also fresh tripe and chicken, and fresh chicken, ham and rice. To name just a few. I think that is much better than what I was giving him at the start, which was an undefined conglomeration of god knows what. We are moving up in the world of dog food.

Well, now I have to get going. It´s that time of the morning again.

Have a good day. I am bound to have one.

Ciao...